Campaign for the American Reader: Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "Eugene Onegin"

Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "Eugene Onegin"

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published this month. He has also just published Neumann's Last Concert, the fourth novel in a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, finally, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if

it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin begins:

She had “a voice like money.” And with those four short words, F. Scott Fitzgerald described the girl that Jay Gatsby, the Great Gatsby, did everything to win, the girl who would eventually cost him his life. Daisy had “a voice like money.” Reading that, those four short words, you know that what Gatsby thought he had to have to have her, the vast sums of money he was willing to break all the rules to get, meant nothing to her because it was something she had always had. That line, those four commonplace words, stays with you forever, after you have read The Great Gatsby. There are other lines as good as that in the things Fitzgerald wrote. There are more of them in the stories Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s first great writer wrote.

In "The Queen of Spades," Pushkin’s best known, and most popular, story, Hermann, desperate to learn the secret of how to win at cards, sends a letter to a woman he is trying to seduce. “It contained a confession of love; it was tender, respectful, and translated word for word from a German novel. But Lizaveta Ivanovna did not know German and found it very satisfactory.” When he sends her more letters, no longer translations, they are written “in a style that was characteristic of him, expressing both the uncompromising nature of his desire and the confusion of his unbridled imagination.”

In "The Blizzard," Pushkin captures in a single sentence the dominant influence among Russian women in the early 19th century: “Maria Gavralovna had been brought up on French novels and was consequently in love.” In "The Shot," he summarizes the significance of a visit by a rich landowner to one of his estates as “a historical occasion for people living in the country.” They “speak of nothing else for two months before the visit and for three years after.” In "The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha," the mind of those ambitious for place and power, not just in Russia, but everywhere, is understood immediately when Pushkin writes “Vronski, a wealthy young man who usually let his feelings be governed by the opinion of others, fell head over heels in love with her because the Sovereign had once met her on the English Embankment and talked with her for a full hour.”

Some of Pushkin’s stories are based on...[read on]

About Buffa's new novel Neumann’s Last Concert, from the publisher:

Neumann’s Last Concert is a story about music and war and the search for what led to the greatest evil in modern history. It is the story of an American boy, Wilfred Malone, who lost his father in the early days of the Second World War and a German refugee, Isaac Neumann, the greatest concert pianist of his age when he lived in Berlin, but who now lives, anonymous and alone, in a single rented room in a small town a few miles from San Francisco.

Wilfred has a genius for the piano, “a keen curiosity not yet corrupted by vanity” and “a memory that forgot nothing essential.” Neumann, alone in his room, is constantly writing, an endless labyrinth of questions and answers, driving him farther and farther back into the past, searching for the causes, searching for the meaning, of what happened in Germany, trying to understand what had led him, a German Jew, to stay in Germany when he could have left but instead continued to perform right up to the night that during his last concert they took his wife away.

Neumann’s Last Concert is a novel about the great catastrophe of the 20th century and the way in which music, great music, preserves both the hope of human decency amidst the carnage of human insanity and the possibility of what human beings might still accomplish.